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Pa~nting Modem Life Ralph Rugoff
ln the e.arly 1960s, at a time when abstraction still largely dominated
serious contemporary art, a small group of artists quietly introduced
a major tum in the history of painting. Working independently of one
another, Gerhard Richter in Cologne, and Andy Warhol and Richard
Artscr.wager in New York, began making paintings that translated
photograp · c images taken from newspapers, advertisements,
hist r:: ar ·ves and snapshots . Whereas artists since Eugene
Delacroi:x · . e nineteenth century had routinely used photographs
as an ' -mimoire in preparin g compositions, the approach of these
artists wen1: beyond u sing photography as the equivalent of a
prepare_- !)' sketch or as a resource for pictorial ideas. Instead, their
work ex_ ::ru addressed the nature of its source mat erial in w ays
-· ..2.t !L fotln ~-explored not only t he relationship of painting
an p l-_ togra, ' y, but also the nature of how we forge our pictures
of'reaJD,"'.
~:._ r_g ·.•.-:-ill _ -ases from the early 1960s by Michelangelo Pistoletto
::r. -:- s .-l..ngeles-based Vij a Celmins and New York-based
~.'-=- :.m ~ ~ rl.ey, many of these seminal works were executed in
5!"'~ -·, a:::. ing the black-and-white photography that dominated
:::--.2 ~3Sm- -- o'<he day . And while these artists employed a variety
c:- --:, ~~-:-.:ss, ranging from Warhol' s incorporation of silkscreens to
_!.:= · .·• :a_se s- e of a textured Celotex ground to the discreetly
r- · · ~---=: -,·!Jainting of Richter, Celmins and Morley, all of their
;::....,_. <5 --:-c:r~ed a self-evident resemblance to the mechanical
~m-:i:::...:::O :s _which they were based. Rather than merely being
a SoC:-.~ p2.inting, in other words, photography- and the culture
-:~"~ =~2.•.-ned - became in these works an integral part of the
~- a ·:.z::=.:: 2-.-e: _ hotography provided these artists with the raw
:C.=.-::a :.:1.: =.'j7.w~.e world around them. 'Photography had to be
=:; ~.~: m e than art history; it was an image of my, our,
~=52 --"~y :c21" - ·,'Richter observed ina 1972 interview. 'And I did
not take it as a substitute for reality but as a crut ch to help m e to get
to reality.' 1 Drawing on the vast archive of existing photography,
artists were able to re-introduce a broad range of socially-inflected
subject matter into the field of painting. Warhol explored the dark
side ofindustrial society with canvases that recycled news images of
car crashes and the electric chair, and along with Richter produced
portraits of a grief-stricken Jacqueline Kennedy based on photographs
taken after the assassination of President Kennedy. Richter' s pictures
repeatedly referenced the history of the Second World War and its
aftermath, including the rise of grim modernist cityscapes and
oppressively anonymous housing developments- a subject covered
across the Atlantic at roughly the same time by ,t\.rtS v ager.
Vija Celmins' Time Magazine Cover (1965, p. ) prese ce • agrisaille
image of the news periodical featuring a story on tr.e \':c.- cS rio·s,
a major civic conflictin Los Angeles that ep :- - t£-.e 10nse state
ofrace relations in the United States. A few yec.rs :acer, P' -Laid
Hamilton used a Daily Mail photo of his galleri51: ~ober. "rc.S~r
handcuffed to MickJagger following a drug arreS'L =.s 1:£-.2 oas'.s :'or
Swingeing London67(f) (1968-69), a pointed !Tll't':e:-.:.c.::-_.- ::-. rr:.2e.a
sensationalism as well as a wry deflatio n oft ,e p pu.2::' :_~Z5e :::
1960s London. And in the early 1970s, both Malcolr.: ;.~c:-': ~.- =-:-_:::.
Franz Gertsch dedicated monumental canvasts 1: ~..2.'i' SS ::::2-.: -.. =.:
in Vietnam. Paintings such as these reframed con:e:q:c::-o-=-:.- -- =o-: ::-_.
in ways that confronted the view er's attitude ·o-...-c.r::S :rz: = ~ =·;: ::-.::s
of the day.
Beyond headline news, painters also drew on pu' ::¢:rrz:.=:" = -~ =-::..:::.
personal snapshots as the basis for pictures that ex<p-.c,.....n:_ =-=-~ ~
cultural milieus of the 1960s. One of Richter's ear lies: ::c.::-::s~ --- =
schematic and thinly painted Folding Dryer (1962, p . Eo , =-:===.=::translated an advertising image of a merry house1.•."'.:'e -.•• -:-_:_ :::..=-::- = -
portable drying rack. Malcolm Morley's On Deck t1t;EE. ~ - :3:
transformed a glossy reproduction from a cruise -~.T= ::r:;::::-_::::= =.::: = large, luridly-coloured canvas that satirised bo ·rg ~ -:s ~--;:::....~::::::..; :::~
the 'good life,' as well as the fantasies romoted by mass marketing.
Robert Bechtle's paintings, based on s .apshots of his own family and
environs in the San Francisco area, por ·rayed scenes of white middle
class American life that seemed quietl l haunted by an atmosphere
ofisolation and sterility. Meanwhile, David Hackney in London
and Los Angeles, and, slightly later, Fr nz Gertsch in Lucerne,
Switzerland, drew on their own photo raphs to create epic portraits
of acquaintances in the growing bohe ian and gay subcultures of
the 1960s and early 1970s. In these pai tings, details of clothing, hair
styles, physical attitudes and living sp ces delineated the rise of an
This renewed concern with depicting t 1e social landscape was not a
matter of seeking to imitate journalisti reportage, however. For all
its seemingly styleless style, the work fthese artists embodied a
sophisticated play with pictorial conve tions. It brought to bear on
photographic imagery the accumulate memory of painterly
traditions, framing the immediacy of c ntemporary experience
within the history of an ancient mediu , so that the subject of even
the most casual snapshot took on an u expected gravity when
translated to the canvas. In this respec , the approach of these artists
comprised a progressive leap backwar .s, sailing past critic Clement
Greenberg's proscriptive formulations that modern painting should
be divorced from worldly concerns and imagery to ideas raised by
Photo source for Richard Hamilton, Swingeing London 67 (f), 1968-69 (cat. 33, reproduced right) 1
Detail from Richard Hamilton 's photo collage, Swingeing London 67, 1967-68
French poet (and critic) Charles Baudelaire in his 1863 essay
'The Painter of Modern Life' . Baudelaire had described 'the painter
of modern life' as dedicated to depicting the fast-changing landscape
of modern life- capturing images ofthe 'transient, the fleeting,
the contingent' and 'extract(ing) from fashion that poetry that
resides in its historical envelope.'Z At a moment when art was still
largely engaged with treating time-honoured themes (mythology,
ceremonial history, religious scenes) in terms that drew on
established aesthetic decorum, Baudelaire's call for painters to focus
on the world around them was relatively novel. Most importantly,
he championed a mode of painting that, rather than compete with
photography, would instead fuse reportage with the 'high
philosophical imagination' of fine art.
Almost 100 years after the publication of Baudelaire's essay, the work
of Warhol, Richter, Artschwager et al, seemed to offer a significantly
updated version of the poet's schema for a contemporary history
painting. Inasmuch as 'the painter of modern life' explores and
confronts his times, rather than merely reflects them, it was no mere
irony that their pictures were translations of photographic images.
Indeed, what was truly timely about their approach was its dual fo cus:
their paintings not only addressed the world in which they lived but
also the phenomenon of how it was represented. Beyond forging a
telling chronicle of the times, these artists proposed that painting
could constitute a means of thinking about the making and reading
of images as a paramount activity of modern life. Thus the evolution
oftheirworkis also the story of how representational painting was
transformed into both a conceptual practice and a platform for
probing the social and cultural histories of our mass media age.
Anticipating many key aesthetic concerns of the next four decades,
this approach to painting initially grew out of an impulse to find a
'third way' between traditional modes of pictorial representation
and modernist avant-gardism. In the art world of1960, the latter was
still largely unchallenged. The idea that advanced painting had to
be abstract and divorced from worldly imagery dominated critical
thinking- a position articulated most forcefully by Greenberg.
'A modernist work of art must try, in principle, to avoid communication
with any order of experience not inherent in the most literally and
essentially construed nature of the medium,' Greenberg had declared.
'Among other things this means renouncing illusion and explicit
subject matter.' l
In part, this aversion to representation grew out ofthe long history
of painting's relationship to photography, and to the notion-
voiced shortly after the latter's invention- that serious painting
must inevitably concede the task of straightforward depiction to
the camera. 4 But for artists in the early-to-mid 1960s, painting from
photographic sources offered an escape route from what had become
a limiting annalist end game. Figuration - considered regressive
if not rea ·a nary since the critical triumph of abstract painting in
:.2
David Hackney The Room, Manchester Street Acrylic on canvas 304.8•213 .4 em
the 1940s- was seized upon by these artists as a means of resistance
to modernism's linear 'progress' . Indeed, by choosing to translate
photographic imagery into paintings, artists sought to free
themselves from modernism's relentless emphasis on formal
invention. Whereas 'painterly' issues of composition, colour
relationships and handling had previously been seen as central
concerns of their medium, and the basic materials offorging a heroic
artistic signature, these artists cultivated a neutral, self-effacing style
that was conspicuously low-key and distinguished their work not only
from the dramatic gestures of Abstract Expressionism but also from
the snazzy graphic punch of Pop art. Devoid of affectation, their work
emphasised its information content, fore grounding the importance
of the image and placing the artist's subjectivity in the background.
If Abstract Expressionism had valorised the artist's inner life as a
wellspring of creativity, these painters - along with their Pop peers
followed the lead of Jasper Johns, whose target and flag paintings
of the late 1950s had utilised 'objective' or pre-existing images that,
in historical terms at least, had nothing to do with the rhetoric of
existential identity.
Pop art , developiJlg at roughly the same moment, followed a similar
tactic of presenting images of mass-produced images. But in contrast
to the slick commercial vocabulary appropriated by most Pop artists,
Richter, Artschwager, Celmins, Morley and Warhol (at least in his
'Death and Disaster' series) based their far more sober pictures on
images of everyday life that were redolent with allusions to the
contemporary social environment as well as recen· history. And
compared to Pop's ironic celebration of commercial cui re, their
choice of imagery as well as their style of depiction srruc' a decidedly
unheroic note. Pictures ranging from Celmins' 1966 wir_ds· ie:C.
vista of a Los Angeles freeway (Freeway, p. 74) to Artsc' \ ·c.ger's
cont emporaneous depictions of nondescript offices and faa r.es
(e.g. Office Scene, 1966, p. 66, and Fabrikhalle, 1969, p. 6-t) c.r,e :r..i"'.:.sce with a dismally comic banality. Yet these artists regarcied : r.<: ~::.:-:.a:
as being far from trivial: just as the ordinary may often e a ·.-e~ :'c:
something else, in their eyes banality was a potentially rid'. ::.r.C:
revealing vein of anthropological data. ln addition, a num er :'
works by these,artists expressed a sympathetic attitude tov:a.-c:
what Artschwager called 'the pathos of photography' .; Co LSi de:-2-=
in all its lowly incarnations - cheap newspaper reproducr. ns,
tourist postcards, publicity materials- the photograph ad' J~.e
the pictorial equivalent of a weed, a devalued and routinely over
coked cultural artefact. 'Perhaps .. . I'm sorry for the photograph,'
Richter once remarked in explaining his work 'I would like to make
it valid, make it visible.' 6 Thus their project of recuperating the
banal included not just the subject matter found in photographs,
but aspects of photographic reproduction itself that were left
unscrutinised by Pop art's iconic treatment of common objects.
New art evolves not only in reaction to the achievements of a
preceding generation, but also in response to the cultural landscape
of the times. By the early 1960s, photographic media had become
a conspicuously pervasive, even overwhelming, aspect of
contemporary life. Artists found themselves working amidst an
explosion ofreproductions and images in comparison with which
first-hand experience seemed to diminish in importance. 'Cinema,
television, magazines, newspapers immersed the artist in a total
environment and this new visual ambience was photographic,'
Richard Hamilton observed at the time. 'Somehow it didn't seem
necessary to hold on to that older tradition of direct contact with the
world. Magazines, or any visual intermediary, could as well provide
a stimulus [for making pictures].'? By using photographic sources,
artists tacitly acknowledged that it no longer made sense to isolate
the making of pictures from the dizzying plenitude of mechanically
reproduced images, and to varying degrees their work explored how
this ubiquitous medium was altering our ways of seeing.
Over the years, many critics have argued that this approach to
painting was primarily concerned with interrogating the
documentary status of photographic media as well as the mediated
nature of contemporary experience. ln fact, only a relative handful of
paintings produced by these artists explicitly engaged in this kind of
critique. 8 One such work, Richter's Volker Bradke (1966, p. 63)
persuasively portrays what appears to be a newspaperimage of a
" •
Franz Gertsch Vietnam, 1970 Dispersion on unprimed half-linen 205x290 em
young leftist leader surrounded by followers and posters, conjuring
the type of protest movements then spreading across Europe and the
United States. The painting was, in fact, based on a photograph
Richter took of a friend at an arts festival, and so, as an exercise in
duplicity, equates our faith in the credibility of photographic realism
with a na'ive willingness to fo !low ideo logical icons. 9
For the most part, however, this kind of painting was principally
engaged with deconstructing a traditional understanding of 'realism'.
Towards this end, the most fertile emphasis of this work was on the
activity, and consequences, of translating imagery from one medium
to another. Rather than simply drawing on photography as a source
of subject matter, these artists were interested in examining how the
meaning and information content of a photographic image inevitably
changes when it is reinvented as the subject of a canvas. By mixing
painterly and photographic codes to create complex and contradictory
sets of pictorial signs, their work unsettled preconceptions about both
media while probing the role played by codes and conventions in
forging our perception and understanding of the world.
ln other words, these artists were motivated by a desire to blur the
line between existing categories of depiction, along with the values
attendant to each of them. Hamilton summed up this position in a
1968 article on painting and photography by remarking, 'I felt that l
would like to see how close to photography l could stay yet still be a
painterin intent. 'loOn the most literal level this blurring of categories
took the form of conflating signs of the handmade and the mechanical,
jasper johns Flag, 1954-55 Encaustic oil and collage on fabric mounted on plywood (3 panels) 107.3xl53.8 em 13
Gerhard Richter Administrative Building, 1964 Oil on canvas 90• 150 em
a tactic pioneered by Warhol's silk-screening of photographic imagery
directly on o canvas. Taking up Warhol's example, Richter developed
his t echnique of feathering a wet brush over the surface of a painting
to smear r 'bl r' the underlying image in order to mimic the
\'ar.ab e Locus of a photograph. Other artists such as Franz Gertsch
n:e:i y reproduced photographic effects such as the artificial
:.:gr_: eared- y - ash bulbs and the flattening of pictorial space while
::~.g mec - ·cal enlargements with the heroic scale of their In purely visual terms, the most disorienting aspect of this approach
g all ofthese approaches, artists conflated the to painting was the way it conflated flatness and illusionism. One of
"'-~· e : - e 'nfinite reproducibility of photography with the the consequences of working from photographs, which offer a unified
::':Itc, · ·n: . e status of the art object, creating a hybrid for!ll that consistency of detail, was that artists gave equal attention to every
S:nn·1ar- us y evoked public and private, the plural and the part of the canvas' surface. Echoing the 'all-over' composition of
singular. As psychologist (and LSD pioneer) Timothy Leary remarked Jackson Pollock's Abstract Expressionism and Jasper Johns' targets
of Gertsch's paintings, these works wed 'the subjective personal aura and flags, their works effectively lacked a centre of attention. This
of the handmade artefact to the clarity of the photograph.' 11 In that levelling or equalising ofthe painting's surface resulted in a pictorial
unsettling mix - in which the conventions of both media were equally flattening that obscured the separation between figure and
estranged- one could perhaps discern an allusion to an ongoing crisis background so that the objects no longer either dramatically jumped
of definition that then beset traditional ideas of individuality and out from the picture plane or receded into an illusionary depth.
identity; for example, the ambiguous ' reality' of Gertsch's paintings
seemed to mirror that of Lucerne's gender-crossing youth culture,
the subject of some of his key works from the early 1970s.
The temporality of these pictures was also provocatively ambiguous.
Photography, which records an impression made from the light
reflected off physical objects, is conventionally seen as having a
direct, or indexical, relationship to reality. The scene it depicts is tied
to a specific and irretrievable moment in time. Representational
painting, on the other hand, makes no claim on reality beyond that
of creating a likeness of its subject. Its subject exists not in a frozen
moment of past time, but in an unfolding present. Thus a painting of
a photograph would seem to automatically short-circuit the indexical
status of its source. But in the paintings made by these artists, the
contradictory temporal values of these two media were disarmingly
merged. They mixed the present-tense corporeality of the canvas with
the removed and disembodied character of the photograph, engaging
us in an elusively shifting experience ofti.me and physical presence
an encounter that echoed the confusions between first and second
hand experience engendered in a media -saturated culture. They
conjured, in other words, a kind of post-modern temporality inflected
by currents of reference and repetition, and in which images of the
present were inevitably permeated with a sense of deja-vu.
14
In works by a number of artists , including Richter, Celmins, Hackney,
Hamilton and Morley, the image was also occasionally framed by a
white border (sometimes an allusion to the border of a snapshot),
which further heightened the t ension between the canvas' surface
and the recessive space of the image. But rather than seeking, in the
tradition of Paul Cezanne, to u ltimately affirm the flatness of the
image's support, this approach to painting produced a pu lsating
stereoscopic space, vertiginously alternating between depth and
surface, that kept the viewer' s perception in a constant state of flux.
Celmins, commenting on her own practice in terms that also apply to
that of her peers, explained that she was interested 'in that nstant
tension and shifting between the feeling of depth and a siT.ct
adherence to the reality of the two- dimensional plane ... wher. these
two are in a certain balance I perceive a projection of a nor he 'in
space.Itis this which I find exciting.'l2
With their non-hierarchical composition, in which obje s we:-e
treated without any distinction between their importances L:n-=.: a
background detail might be accorded the same a moun- f a--:er.C. n as
a face, these paintings suggested a pictorial equivalen- ft ' _e r_D:._-.-~:::.:
roman pioneered by Alain Robbe-Grillet (an author· w . G~r._::ls
was particularly interested). In comparing Morley's w rk - :r_e
nouveau roman, art historian Arnold Hauser (who was briefy =.
i J ·~
i
I :j
J l l ;
colleague of Morley's at Ohio State University) pointed out how the
artist's method of using a grid system, where each subdivided area of
the canvas was painted independently, created a paradoxical effect
that destabilised the apparent unity of the image. 'The progressive
addition of one particle after another intercepts a figurative
perception oft he painting and de-individualises its parts' - an effect
:ha- · g lighted ·he abstraction of the actual photographic source.l 3
~e percep schizophrenia engineered by these works was further
au~ er.ted, a · cularly in the large-scale, Ektachrome-like paintings
:. t r\ey and Gertsch, by their meticulous magnification of small
_ :-, ;:ograp' · c reproductions, so that the intimacy of the source
:n.aJ:erial · as uncann'ly preserved at the scale of history painting.
Though often subtle enough to pass under the radar of conscious
perception, these various optical strategies produced a net effect of
infecting seemingly straightforward images with a disarming
disequilibrium . The key to achieving this result was the manner in
which artists, in translating photographic imagery into paintings,
managed to preserve a near-perfect tension between the visual
rhetoric of parallel pictorial systems. 'These works do not rest on a
secure, one-directional reference, but fluctuate between source and
transformation, between one sign system and another,' as Lawrence
Alloway observed of Morley's paintings. 'In place of wonder we are
given uncertainty, but both states offeeling have to do with a mobile
rather than a fixed subject matter.' l4
Morley himself described this effect in terms that reflected the
counter-culture ethos of the late 1960s. 'If what the vieweris
experiencing fa r away is totally different to what is going on up close,
then something is happening in them, not in the picture. They're
actually having hallucinations. Painting that doesn't hallucinate is not
painting. 'lS Morley' s reference to hallucination, as well as the
uncertainty described by Alloway, directly link the effect of this work
to the notion of the uncanny, leading us to the surprising revelation
that, in its second coming, the painting of modern life sought to
portray contemporary history with one of the primary tools of
Surrealist art.
Uncanniness can be understood as the effect produced by a familiar
object that has been rendered suspect or inexplicably strange, and so
provokes an anxious confusion about its status. Rather than pioneering
Malcolm Morley HMS Hood (Friend), 1965 liq uitex and ink on ca nva s 106•106 em
new formal languages, the Surrealists had characteristically made use
of conventional representations of reality- including photography
and realist painting- that they then defamiliarised by various means.
But while Salvador Dali and Rene Magritte played on the contradiction
of depicting dream-like scenes in a realistic manner, the artists
mentioned above undermined the conventions of realism in a far less
obvious fashion. Painters like Celmins, Morley, Bechtle and Gertsch
managed to imbue a sense of enigma and ambiguity in everyday images
of unblinking precision and clarity. Rather than conjuring another kind
of reality, their work seemed to denature our most fundamental means
of picturing the objective world: photographic realism.
This uncanny depiction of the photographic could be seen as
challenging our very ability to grasp the real. Remarking on this
phenomenon, Richter noted that photography is 'what everyone
believes in nowadays: it's "normal". And if that then becomes "other",
the effect is far stronger than any distortion of the sort you find in
Dali' s figures or Bacon's. Such a picture can really scare you.01 6
What is 'scary' about such pictures is the way they undo the formal
categories and definitions with which we make up our image of the
world around us. They imply not only that realism , whether in
photography or painting, is merely a style, an artificial and arbitrary
rhetorical convention, but also that the 'reality' it claims to depict is
merely a discursive category, rather than something that we have
direct access to. A fundamental alienation thus characterises our
relationship to our pictures of the world, which we produce by
translating and interpreting interlocking systems of signs, each of
which frames 'objective' reality in different terms.
The great discovery of these artists was to find a means of delineating
this tnteUectually complex puzzle by mixing up the codes of two types
of rear Rather than focusing on imagery per se, their work called
t e fact that the meaning of pictures, and indeed of all
rtz: we -rce · e, is largely framed by contingent conventions,
-n timeless formal laws. Again, Richter eloquently sums
. - .e sttuation: 'Life communicates itself to us through convention
a.r. ugh parlour games and laws of social life. Photographs are
ephemeral images of this communication- as are the pictures that
I pa"nt from photographs. Being painted they no longer tell of a
specific situation, and the representation becomes absurd. '17
The photographic representation becomes 'absurd,' or uncanny,
precisely because it has been translated into a medium where its
indexical status and corollary 'truthfulness' is commingled with
the conventions of a competing sign system. The result denatures
our reading of both media, and underscores the artificiality of how
we look at both realist painting and photography as faithful
representations of the world.
In the hands of these artists, then, resemblance became a means of
unsettling the familiar and the recognisable, rather than reaffirming
the known. But their strategic intent went beyond a critical
deconstruction that denied the universality of any particular sign
system or medium. It also involved an attempt to open up the field of
representation to encompass contradictory and multiple readings.
As Hamilton noted of his own approach, 'It's an old obsession of
mine to like to see conventions mix ... [they] multiply the levels of
meaning and ways of reading.' 18 lnstead of cancelling each other out,
the competing conventions in these pictures create a productive
uncertainty that invites us to continually renegotiate how we look at
and think about them.
In presenting pictures that have already been 'read' - interpreted and
modified from their original state- these artists also connected their
own work to our activity as viewers. Their art joins us in a linked
enterprise of interpretation whilst insisting that a work's meaning
emerges from a process of reading as much as from making.
16
Underlying this approach is the idea, derived from Marcel Duchamp's
'ready-mades', that artistic creation can be a matter of aJtering
existing material rather than creating from scratch (an attitute that, in
part at least, reflects an engaged response to the teeming abundance of
objects and images produced within consumer societies). At the same
time, the process of transforming an image's significance through a
modest modification highlights the contingency of how we assign
meaning to pictures, and also calls into question our underst anding
of art's conceptual underpinnings. ' I remember being inspired o
imagine what is art if you remove all of these [traditional elements:,'
Celmins commented ofherpared-down approach to painting from
photographs. 'What was left was a kind of poetic reminder of how
little a work of art really is art, and how elusive it is to chase that part
that excites you and turns one thing into something else .' 19 Bereft of
grandiose distractions, this kind of painting invites us to chase the
play of those elusive mechanisms in our own thinking as well.
Ultimately, rather than receiving a death sentence from the camera's
invention, painting encompassed photography to redefine and extend
its conceptual reach. The great irony of this development is that, in an
era of instant media, painting's resilience has been intricately linked
to its slowness as a medium. Not so much in the sense that it takes
time to make a painting (as opposed to the fraction of a second needed
to take a photograph), but in the sense that its more nuanced and
variegated surface invites the eye to linger, to scrutinise the hundreds
of contacts between brush and canvas. Compared to a photograph's
slick and uniform flatness, the layering of information in a painting
with its under-drawing, its washes and built-up levels of paint, its
complexly mixed colours- requires far more time to process. Drawing
on these traditional elements of craft to critically decelerate our
reading of the familiar, this approach to painting managed to instil a
crucial delay in our response to overexposed photographic imagery.
It thus opened up a space for re-evaluating the meaning of our mass
produced pictures of modern life, and for reinvesting feeling into
images whose affect has been drained through repetition. Only by
exploiting its slowness, then, were these artists able to reinvent a
radical role for painting. Their legacy, developed by succeeding
generations, reveals how painting, far from being an irrelevant
cultural antique or mere commodity in the marketplace, continues to
be an indispensable medium for confronting and understanding
images of the times in which we live.
Richard Hamilton whitely Boy, 1965 oil on photograph laid on panel
81• 122 em
Notes
1 Gerhard Richter, 'Interview with Peter Sager', in Th e Daily Practice of Painting: Writings 1962-1993, Hans-Uirich Obrist (ed.), Th ames & Hudson, Lo ndon, 1995, p. 66.
2 Charles Baudelaire, 'The Pa in ter of Modern Life', in The Painter of Modern life and Other Essays, jonathan Mayne (ed. and trans.),
Phaidon Press, London, 1964.
3 Clement Greenberg, 'Sculpture in our time', 1958, in 'The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4, john O'Brian (ed.). The University of Chi cago Press, Chica go, 1993, p. 56.
4 indeed in 1839, in response to the invention of the daguerreotype, academic painter Paul Del a roche became the fi rst of many to premat urely announce the death of painting.
5 Richard Artschwager and Frede ric Pa ul, 'Conversation, 14 Apri l, june-july 2003', in Richard Artschwoger, Oomaine de Kerguehennec, France, 2003.
6 Gerha rd Richter, The Doily Practice of Painting, op. cit., p. 33-
7 Richa rd Hamilton, 'Photography and Pa inting', in Studio
International, March 1969 , p. 120.
8 See, for example, jerry Saltz, 'The Richter Resolution', and 'Photo finish: Call ing for a four-year moratorium on a fashionable, far too overworked trend', in Village Voice, 5 March , 2004: and Robert Storr, Gerhard Richter. Forty Years of Painting, The Museum of Modern Art,
New York, 2002.
9 Richter's Volker Bradke comprised the central element of an exhibition devoted entirely to the figu re of Bradke held in 1966 at the Gallery Schmela in Cologne, where the painting was accompan ied by photographs and an out-of- focus f ilm
of Bradke.
10 Rich ard Hami lton, op. cit.
11 Timothy Leary, 'Timothy Leary about Franz Gertsch', in Franz Gertsch, Kunstmuseum Luzern, Lucerne, Switzerland,
1972, unpaginated.
12 Vija Celmins, in Susan Larsen , 'A Conversation with Vija Celmins', in journal, The Institute of Contempora ry Art,
no. 20, October 1978, p. 37-
13 jean-Claude Lebensztejn, Malcolm Morley: Itineraries,
Reakt ion Books, London, 2002. p. 48.
14 Lawrence Alloway, 'The Paintings of Malcolm Morl ey ',
in Art and Artists, February 1967, pp. 16-19.
1S Robert Storr, 'Let's Get Lost: Interview with Malcolm Morl ey
in Art Press, May 1993, pp. 3-7.
16 Gerhard Richter, 'Notes, 1964-1965,' in The Doily Practice
of Po inting, op. cit., p. 30.
17 Ibid, p. 31.
18 Richard Hamil ton, op. cit.
19 Vi ja Celmins, in Lane Relyea, Robert Gober, Briony Fer, Vijo
Celmins, Phai don Press, London, 2004, p. 123.